Perhaps the urn was made all those years ago
not to hold oil, which it has never held, not
as the ground for the pictures, which
have chipped off, though a hand remains
unattached to a person, not to be carried
from place to place, though its handles are still
intact, but to dream of the museum,
and the museum attendants, daydreaming
in corners, and the mother, holding
the hand of the little girl in the itchy
red wool, passing the older girl a pencil,
to make a sketch of the urn. Instead, the urn
dreams of a photographer, walking briskly
through the museum not looking
at the objects in the cases, or even at
the other people looking, but at the way
the ceiling lights are reflected in the glass.

About Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson is an Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of six books of poetry with Auckland University Press, most recently I, Clodia (November, 2014), a verse biography. She is currently working on verse biography as a literary genre and recently co-hosted a conference Truth or Beauty: Poetry and Biography, which had as one of its main aims to bring together Australian and New Zealand poets.